The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview Weekend Edition – Dean & DeLuca Invitational

There was a surprising amount of talk this week among our little community over evaluating the importance of the wind in choosing players. It was interesting to see how adamant some were in telling people to ‘ignore’ the anxiousness over the winds, even as they were reported to be gusting up to 35 mph by mid afternoon on Thursday. What made it particularly odd was the the forecast for Friday showed the winds being higher in the morning than the afternoon which meant the AM/PM wave would have the better time for each day. Now, to reiterate, there were still some nice scores posted by the PM/AM wave, but the difference between the two waves averaged just under 3 strokes….3 strokes. Think about that for a minute. If you took my advice and stacked 30% of your rosters and all of your big teams in the AM/PM wave, you should be in decent shape tonight as those teams should have a little edge on the field. Do not take this to mean that you should panic every time you hear about wind, but have a plan in mind. If you select your player pool and can organize your picks to build some teams that are all morning or all afternoon, you make zero sacrifice to the quality of your teams. The worst case scenario is that the weather hits both waves evenly and it evens out. The best case is that those teams you stacked far outperform the rest of the field and give you a leg up over most of your competitors. As we saw again this week, there are still plenty of owners who are either too lazy or too stubborn to utilize this obvious approach so it will still provide you with an edge again and again. Sometimes you just need to block out the noise and follow the most obvious path available. Remember, in our recommended approach, you sacrifice nothing. What is to be gained by being stubborn? In this game, with the volatility involved each week and players never performing exactly as expected, we have to take advantage of every edge presented to us.

Now that we are through the cut, let’s take a quick look at the weekend to see if there are some opportunities for us. The first thing that we need to account for is whether there is an MDF or not. This week, with 72 players getting through the cut, we will not face an MDF meaning that we can aggressive without any worries of losing players (unless we get into another Charl Schwartzel situation with a rare, mid round post-cut WD). This means that we should be looking for a few lesser owned players near the bottom, players that have decent scoring potential and those that have shown that they play their best golf in the later rounds. I do not like to get too tied down in players who score well in a particular round, but I have noticed that certain players do tend to show up a little more after the cut than others while certain golfers naturally fade.

For weather, winds are still factor tomorrow, but they are going to be about the same all day long. We are looking at winds of around 15-16 mph with gusts up to 22-23 mph all day. Sunday actually looks really good for winds, but there is the potential for storms. There really is no advantage in looking at the tee times this weekend, but as always, it is very important to take a peak just in case. With weekend contests, weather is that much more important so never take it for granted, especially when a handful of points can separate you from a huge prize or just a small payoff.

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